Participation Points: NaNoWriMo

Homeostasis has kicked in once more, a terrifying reality, and my mood, once lifted, has again suffocated. I’ve missed two more classes once more, and although I’m adamant with positive thoughts, although I attend therapy regularly, although this medication helps at a minimum level, my energy has depleted once more, my attention as well, and there’s a crack in the universe.

There are feelings which often grip on the soul, and those are the ones neither therapy nor medication has ever seemed to help. I’ve done a lot of work over the years on changing my mindset, and I believe I’ve come a long way. I’m confident in many things. I’m not so confident in a few things, and that’s okay–you can’t be perfect. What baffles me is how terrifyingly relentless my brain is with attacks on itself.

That being said, I got home today and have scrolled through fifty million posts talking about NaNoWriMo. This is number fifty million and one.

If there is one thing that is always there for me, it’s my imagination. Whether it works against me with strange men following me in the dark and putting thoughts in my head, or it graces me with some short stories that have professors with a history of being published bowing at my feet–it’s always been there. It was there when I was five years old, often alone, and listening to the cars out in the parking lot talk among themselves. I would laugh with them and they would have personalities based on the size of their fenders, tires, and their age. The conversations took place in my head, but the enjoyment, the stories, were very real.

So I’ve decided to participate this year in National Novel Writing Month. I decided today, on November first, to participate. I have a pretty vague idea of what I want to construct, and it’s a bit out of my comfort zone but often that results in greatness.

Although I have much homework to catch up on still, I need to do this for myself. It’s a good dissociative technique for me, writing is, that lets me regroup, rethink, and reconstruct myself. If I finish the 50,000 words, which shouldn’t be a problem, then it will prove I can finish a project. I haven’t finished a project in a very, very long time.

I never even finished the multiple (albeit horrifyingly bad) stories I wrote in elementary school. I was obsessed with several television shows, and would write sequels to them. I made one about a land entirely filled with video game characters and scenes. I even made one based on Harry Potter, the first real book I read as a child. I may have been 6 or so.

Doing things spur of the moment like this, and making a spontaneous commitment can sometimes end up in something extraordinarily grand. I’ve learned that over the years, I suppose. If I create something spectacular, I can look back on this post and say I predicted the future. If I create something ordinarily bland, I can look back on this post and call myself an idiot. Either way, I can look back on this post and have a thought about it. I like thoughts.

I will say one thing about one of my writing projects in particular, the one I don’t like mentioning at all on my blog: I’m very proud of it. It’s come a long way since the idea first blossomed in my head when I was 12. That’s when I got my first laptop by. It was a MacBook.

Scratch that. It was an Ibook, the predecessor to the MacBook. This:

Yeah that piece of overheating, Itunes using, crock of shit. I still have it. It still works. It works like the piece of shit it is.

My father found it behind a NobHill grocery store. He brought it home and I started writing. The ideas were shit, the dialogue was shit, the plot was shit, the story was shit, and I thought I was the next pre-teen J.K Rowling.

Ha, you guys thought my first laptop was an actual expensive MacBook. Like I’d pay 2000 dollars for a computer. My fucking car cost less than that, and at least when it breaks down I don’t have to go and buy a whole new car.

Remember, you can still afford a doctor if you buy a PC.

Because the ideas started when I was around ten or so, the story has grown with me and learned with me. I’ve spent many years just learning lessons and incorporating them into the theme I’ve settled on in this potential novel. I stopped writing or tinkering with it for a while because I realized I needed more life experiences to make it how I wanted it to be. I wrote little fairy tale stories for competitions locally as a teenager, and won, and I knew in my heart of hearts that if I tried hard enough I could probably be one of those elementary school or teen authors who wrote the kids book or “young adult” book that captivated the state, or the nation, or whatever.

Could’ve Been Me

But I didn’t want to be that kid. I had, and still have, a very specific purpose for my writing. I’ve never just written to write. I’ve never just written to inform. I write to communicate. I write to hold mirrors to myself and to others. As a child I knew this. So I kept myself in the shadows and let others take the spotlight. Fifteen minutes of fame is nice. But something someone can read and put on their bookshelf and never touch again isn’t literature to me. It’s a story.

Stories are nice, don’t get me wrong. They’re very . . . cute.

Literature feeds the soul, continuously. For those of us struggling to understand life, for those of us seeing others struggling to understand life, literature is a way for us to reach out and say–hey, I don’t get it either, but here’s my interpretation of you, of me, and of everything.

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Alishia D. is a blogger, a beginning novelist, and a counselor at 2nd Story Peer Respite house where diagnostic labels and the culture of mental health is long forgotten. She's a mental health peer who has bounced through as many labels as she has doctors, and enjoys being sarcastic when she can. She also hates writing in 3rd person.

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No longer do we seek to understand whole persons in their social contexts. Rather, we are there to realign our patients’ neurotransmitters. The problem is that it is very difficult to have a relationship with a neurotransmitter, whatever its configuration.

–Loren R Mosher, M.D to the APA

The FDA calls certain substances “controlled”. But there are no “controlled substances”, there are only controlled citizens.

–Thomas Szasz, MD

Only in psychiatry is the existence of physical disease determined by APA presidential proclamations, by committee decisions, and even by a vote of the members of the APA, not to mention the courts.

–Peter Breggin, MD

Prior to being medicated, a depressed person has no known chemical imbalance.

–Robert Whitaker.

Is NAMI (National Alliance Of The Mentally Ill) A healthcare advocate as it would have the public believe? Having accepted 11.2 million dollars from 18 drug firms between 1996 and mid-1999 [23 million in 2006-2008] it is no less an arm of the pharmaceutical industry than is psychiatry itself.

–Fred A Baughman Jr., MD.

Contrary to what is often claimed, no biochemical, anatomical, or functional signs have been found that reliably distinguish the brains of mental patients.

–Elliot S. Valenstein, Ph.D

There is a great deal of pain in life and perhaps the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.

–R.D Laing, M.D.

Why don’t you have a right to say you are Jesus? And why isn’t the proper response to that “congratulations”?